Lost Voice

Lost voice

What have I got to say
as little as I have to lose and I have lost
as much of worth as any Titan
I have lost my faith and I have lost my voice
to a stream of days
I have also lost
I have been lost between psychedelic states
and I have lost many years by now to
the pain of loss and boredom
I drink to escape the pain
the incurable love and the loss of my son and daughter
I am only at home when I laugh
I am lost when I cry
and I cry often

    

Birthday Memorial

Birthday Memorial

For your birthday, I watered the flowers

you didn’t like. Made the breakfast you didn’t

eat and walked the dog you didn’t want. You didn’t

ask me where your present was. You didn’t pry.

Or nag, fair play. You didn’t try and ruin your own

birthday for a change. You didn’t try and blame me

for once. Pack your precious travel bags, and storm

out of the house. Returning with the pigs who put me

straight under arrest. No you were a model of married

bliss that day. Motionless in bed. Underneath the flowers.

A day I’ll always remember.

    

In memory of water Collected Poems 2008-2018

In Memory of Water

Last night my mood was poetry.

The moon was hanging full of meaning

in its rain cloud ceiling,

obscuring illusory stars like flaws

on an ancient plaster wall.

Though the air was cold and wintry,

the earth was warm from a day’s raining.

I had a sinking feeling

that time could suspend every cause

for a minute’s peace.

And just like that we’re history.

The rain that reminds me stopped falling

on my human failing

and, resolving itself like a balance,

returned me indoors.

At dawn the sickly light made entry

through a dirty window. This morning,

though it was nowhere raining,

poetry - suspended like water

on the poet’s face.

    

Art of cloning - collected poems 2008-2018

The Art of Cloning

I’m not a moral philosopher. However

I can see that some things, right on or quite wrong

deserve the same respect as we offer the atom.

Bombs, of course, are simply not on. Land mines:

dirty pool old man. Genocide: out. Child porn:

no thanks. Racism; queer-bashing; work flirtation:

consigned to history like mass literacy has been.

But – sex. The actual carnal art of fucking people

over, and over the boardroom table, is fine.

Spreading kids like marmite on the toast of the world

like bacteria, and watching it mutate, is a divine right

according to these people. We ought to legislate

and license kids to maniacs like guns. Contraception

made compulsory in some parts of the world, namely

the inhabited ones.  

    

Probing the Mars project - Collected poems 2008-2018

Probing the Mars Project

Looking up, you’d think - if you were watching

Satellites and space probes racing out, and moon bugs landing

On the alien surface of Mars. You’d be thinking that

Up-and-away was the only solution

To poverty, sickness and Third World starvation.

Looking up, you would think, and mean that things really are

All about us: the family, the new TV, the new car;

That medical science will reap gains by exploring

The technical problems of tin-foil exploding. The temperature

Rises: Houston we’re cooking! They launched another turkey

When no-one was looking. But we’re all watching

Now as the pieces descend – the sky’s retribution

For abandoning land. Remember a Challenger died in the sky

With a teacher on board - a teacher we wouldn’t pay

Sufficiently well to persuade her to stay on the earth

For the day. Remember too what it has cost us to fly:

While there’s water on Mars, the Sudan remains dry.

While business and commerce commences in space, and men

With genetics start a new kind of race, please try to reflect on

this Faustian pact: that from one small step - for us all in fact

Comes the patter of a million hungry caterpillar tracks.

    

A girl unmet

To a girl unmet

The air is so still

the mist paralysed as the bricks

and stones

bearing their loads in the face

of the old town houses

I remember thinking

today as the skies

as blue as the truest azure eyes

of the purest girl

you could meet

except that you never did

meet her

your paths never crossed on the sands

washed afresh every day

by the sweep

of the truculent ocean

you were never caught in her hair

by the brush of your fingers

or touched

on the shells of your eyes

by the wisp

of her waist

as the light breeze blows

there was nobody there to remember

no-one to notice the stones

or to share

the quiet of the old town houses

so still was the air

    

Remember when

Remember when

Still you keep my heart

inside your pendant

still you let me swing about

your neck

still you let me think that

we are lovers

but there’s no going back

I kept a piece of my heart

on a shoestring

insurance of a kind when you

weren’t there

I left for Ireland thinking

we were over

your absence clearer than air

that last shard of my heart

became a fossil

like the test of a lover’s faith

I failed you then

I see your pendant shining

like endurance

your treasure trove of warm

remember when’s

    

New poem - Bracing

Bracing

These are the lean ones

the drawn out months of winter

hands down your back

and fingers in purse

these are the days the songbirds disperse

the nights thin and long

as unsnapped spaghetti

and I am drawn

once again to the scourge of our towns

and the smoke filled cities

in all of their colours

blue greens and browns

and as the sun goes down

the haze descends over both eyes

and horizon

dim as the days I have lost to the eiderdown

I finger my wallet

thinner than fish bones

I can’t afford to throw

away on a wish or toss onto the wheelbarrow

where the dry stalks of autumn lie

cracked and cadaverous

my will thaws like frost

as the sun reaches mid-heaven

I am no stone

my trust instantly given

as though hope changed the world

I brace myself for the let down

    

First ever recorded poem Vid

Homesick

I shuffled over sandy shores
my mother’s breath to hear once more
the rhythm of the ocean’s roar
to a universal heart
the moonlit tracks behind me tore
a land of clouds apart

The stones I condemned to the deep
extinguished stars where children sleep
whilst lunar salutations leap
effervescently
I crossed the lands my spirit keep
never so wistfully

I studied the spheres, saw journeys take place
consumed with longing was my inner space
compelled instead to this hideous race
run all alone
condemned I returned to where I can’t face
calling home.

    

First ever recorded poem

Homesick

I shuffled over sandy shores

my mother’s breath to hear once more

the rhythm of the ocean’s roar

to a universal heart

the moonlit tracks behind me tore

a land of clouds apart

The stones I condemned to the deep

extinguished stars where children sleep

whilst lunar salutations leap

effervescently

I criss-crossed the lands my spirit to keep

never so wistfully

I studied the spheres, saw journeys take place

consumed with longing was my inner space

compelled instead to this hideous race

run all alone

condemned I returned to where I can’t face

calling home.

    

The dissident

The dissident

There is no escaping

the sense of the solitary self

no end of aching

as you wake coherent in the face

of a whirlwind of forces

battering your gate

and every movement you are forced to make

is a tug of war with some kind

of wind that blows back

and makes your blood thin

every motion a will at war

with every pull of gravity

and it is a grave

this world we enact

go forth and populate

before we even know what we are doing

the message comes too late

whispered at times

until death slaps you right in the face

with it: the reawakening

religions don’t seem as absurd

you take pity on the struggling winter birds

you even feel for the sheep

nestled in their clouds

sheared so that we can stay warm

slaughtered so we can eat

there is no escaping the whole

of our accident fate

no escaping the hole

the fog of ancient history

my DNA stars to mutate

as I meditate

no longer the stars seem so far away

each cornered room seems dark

the light is different

and I look to death like a friend

I have become attuned

to the cycle of play

in all its violence

there is only one rule I can take away

from this paltry span

on a doomed earth

God forsake every planet

let the Will be alone

as the beings it’s thrown

into the hell I’ve known

take the whole thing back

take my memories

let the sky turn black

I have no others to add to this mix

I am going back

I am life’s yearning dissident

    

EschatonIIISequence contd.

eschatonIIIsequence i p9-10 contd

I must let go of my lover. Put down the will-to-consume and learn from a distant other.

The other may be right there, looking at you, before your face. The trick is to see the metaphysical gap lying like an elephant, unspoken, lying down between

them. I’ve nothing to say, most the time I look for sleep and an REM

Dreams come back when you go straight, the most vivid dreams you wouldn’t wait to wake from.

But you crawl back to them wailing all the same: rather a melting solid than an abysmal game.

I have an empty room I can pay for on offer. That alone as a landing mat keeps me in the endgame.

I will not beat myself up on the issue of repetition. It was a module back on my MA so I’m inclined to leave it.

I left university alright, but I fucked their shit up. I fucked the scroll and more: I fucked a lecturer.

Bonfire night and Halloween have been gone, just a couple of days. I hate this world on its strings.

I struggle to get through perception and its down-ticking hours; I hate the present with wings.

Tomorrow is like another world: I don’t know what it wants or what it will compel me into.

Three pages a day is not a target, it is all that I have. I’ll make the rest up someday. Each day

I write and once again the quiet of the whole world wakes me. And takes me to places you wouldn’t go

To think about what you are saying: do you know how hard that is?

Dear God at least do not send me to the realm of fatties.

I want to stay pure but I break: punctuated like the rings of Saturn.

These are the words of a flake, dedicated to dessication.

Economics and art are where they make something arise from nothing.

The bank is a factory, as is my heart, as is the bent growing Elm tree.

The Tao or the middle path or ‘way’ doesn’t question things, it has grown sick of thinking.

The ‘how’ of the Indians might speak to their accustomed love of drinking.

And that the Aboriginal genocides get no press nor music; is a shame and a stain on my kind.

Thinking and Being are closely aligned.

By thinking I do not mean long processes of words and reasoning. I mean intuiting through to a fault

Thinking is spare as seasoning.

Writing’s a kind of thinking undermined: I am involved in treasoning.

Four pages a day isn’t bad for someone lost and with a life shrinking.